Blackcap Blog

Published at 05:48 on 10 July 2015

Because the austerity is continuing, odds are the depression there will continue, and so will a lack of ability of Greece to repay. Though the beginning of the process of writing off those bad loans is encouraging, the can has merely been kicked a few more years down the road.

And I’m outta here to for a few days to do botanical surveys in the Okanogan Highlands. It’s a part of the state I haven’t seen in about twenty years.

Published at 10:39 on 1 July 2015

So, the one that came with the home I bought is starting to make strange noises in the present heat wave. It’s obviously on its last legs.

It was made in 1993. I did some quick research and it’s easy to find utilities that are offering low-income households to replace for free perfectly good refrigerators made before the year 1999. They’re that inefficient compared to current models. So it’s obviously not worth throwing money at trying to repair the refrigerator I have.

At this point, I start researching efficiency. A super-efficient refrigerator used to mean buying a SunFrost of a VestFrost. But efficiency of the normal big US brands in the USA has increased so much in recent years that you basically gain nothing (except a far lighter wallet) from purchasing a specialty, energy-efficient brand these days.

If you get an EnergyStar model, particularly a smaller, no-frills fridge without energy-wasting features like a built-in icemaker or an in-door ice/water dispenser, you’ll do as well as one of the specialty brands. Plus you’ll have one with standard US dimensions that fits in your existing kitchen without having to remove overhead cabinets (refrigerators built for the European market tend to be taller). So that’s what I did.

The rub is that smaller, no-frills fridges are not carried in stock these days. Everyone wants big and feature-laden. Not me. Not only do those features cost money and waste energy, they also reduce reliability; they are just something more to break. (That’s particularly the case for automatic ice makers.)

When one gets to reviews from Consumer Reports, it’s basically the same story. The smallest model (other than super-tiny dorm-sized fridges) they reviewed was 18 cubic feet. The largest size I am willing to consider is about 15 cubic feet.

So I’ve been compelled to order one sight unseen, despite my worries about noise. The model I chose only had one review I could find complaining about noise, and the noise was caused by for a factory defect and went away when the unit was repaired under warranty. By contrast, several reviews mentioned quietness. Plus, it’s a Frigidaire, and Frigidaire is owned by Electrolux, a Swedish corporation, these days. European brands tend to be better on noise than US ones.

So I’m cautiously optimistic about the noise aspect. We shall see.

Published at 18:58 on 28 June 2015

So, I ordered my replacement KVM switch from Amazon well over a week ago. Being a cheapskate, I opted for the free shipping. Which, of course, was the slowest shipping option.

It ended up being as slow as possible. The surprise was how it ended up being so slow: the item didn’t even ship until Friday, and Amazon then paid extra for a Sunday delivery so that the arrival date could be honored. Seriously, now: WTF? Why not ship it using the slowest, cheapest possible service the day they get the order?

Since it shipped from one of their Seattle-area warehouses, that would mean I got it about as soon as if I had paid extra for expedited shipping. But so what? The worst-case arrival date is just that: a worst case. There’s nothing wrong with making a package come sooner than that, particularly if it costs Amazon less money in the first place.

Then a thought occurred to me: What they did is botch a process (shipping a package) until it became a crisis and then spent extra money on heroic measures to deal with the crisis. That’s exactly how Amazon handles managing their technical staff. Instead of having procedures guaranteed to ensure routine, smooth operation, they pay people extra (Amazon has a reputation for having generous salaries) to work long hours in endless crisis mode (something else Amazon has a reputation for).

So, while consistent, both their shipping and their employee management practices still mystify me.

I can’t find the old post at the moment, but I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this (mis)management style before. Since then, I’ve come up with the term “techno-sadism” to label it by. It’s as if management believes that productivity is managed by making people work as hard as possible, which is done by ensuring that teams are in perpetual crisis mode.

How absurd it is becomes clear when you think of the manufacturing sector. How many manufacturers consider it a good thing to have routine operation of the assembly line to be disrupted regularly, to the point that heroic amounts of overtime and speed-ups are needed to compensate for the disruptions?

Published at 11:51 on 11 March 2015

This is all you need to know to be sure of the statement in the title above.

“Up to” is sales-speak for “no more than”. So the thing has a maximum up time of 18 hours, tops.

100 years ago, the standard “up time” for a mechanical pocket watch was 30 hours. And that’s a conservative 30 hours; many last more like 36. I know, I use a 100-year-old pocket watch. And when a mechanical watch runs down, it takes well under a minute to rewind it.

In contrast, the Apple Watch — which runs for about half as long as my pocket watch — doubtless takes hours to recharge. It has to. It runs on a rechargeable battery, and batteries don’t instantly recharge.

So the Apple Watch not only limited in its functionality, it’s unforgiving and domineering as well. It basically says: You will remember to charge me before you go to bed (and not at any other time), human, or I will punish you by refusing to work the next day. Obey my whim or suffer the consequences.

It is precisely such finicky design that makes me dislike so many applications of high technology. It’s a mystery to me how anyone can be so seduced by consumerism as to want such poorly-designed yet expensive crap in their lives.

Published at 07:08 on 21 January 2015

Random stuff, because I’m still very much alive despite not posting much here recently:

Charlie Hebdo. Yes, their cartoons do have a well-established history of being crude and insensitive. That’s absolutely no justification for the violence (though it does help explain it; justification and explanation are two different things). There is no right to not be offended. What probably sucks more than the loss of life, however, is that France does not seem to be taking the same moral high road Norway took after their recent terrorist attack. There’s way too much talk of “war” happening in France. Neither Al Qaeda nor terrorism is a country with a defined land mass (the first is a non-state actor, the second is a tactic), therefore it is is pointless to wage war on either. I’ve discussed this latter point before, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Construction at home. It’s was a week of not really having my home to myself, because I’m having the carpet replaced with hardwood flooring. And it looks like this disruption is going to last longer than expected, because the adhesive used to attach the stair tread really stinks, so I’m now coping with that issue for at least a week after the work ends.

Durian. Speaking of strong smells, I did finally have time to treat myself to a durian smoothie in celebration of moving and defeating the bedbugs. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered, and now that the experience is fresher in my mind the addictive urge resurfaced. I actually tasted an almond aspect to it this time, which I believe is a first. One of the joys of durian is that it never tastes quite the same twice.

Sometimes, it’s best not to even try. That’s a statement that will make every motivational speaker cringe, but it’s true. One’s plans must be at least somewhat realistic. Consider the fate of the Kalakala. This historic vessel was “saved” from its fate of housing a fish-processing plant in Alaska by being towed back to its old home to await historic restoration. Alas, that latter part of the plan was very expensive, and funds to perform it never materialized. The vessel ended up bleeding its owners white in moorage fees year after year. Its current owner has decided to end the financial bloodbath and recoup at least some of his losses by scrapping it. If it had been left in Alaska, it would either still be a fish processing plant, or be sitting there abandoned (because in a rural area the moorage would be cheap or free and the cost to tow it south for scrapping would exceed the scrap value). It would, in other words, be waiting indefinitely for the right restorer to show up.

Sometimes, one has to try harder. Realism again. It’s a fact of life that some misfortunes, like bedbug infestation, are extremely difficult and expensive to manage. The “experts” will tend to lie to you about the effort and expense required in an attempt to manage the shock value. Absent being one of the lucky few who resolves the problem with minimum effort, the effect of the lies is to draw out the process, because instead of making the full effort needed, weeks and then months get wasted on half-efforts. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way battling scabies, and one I put to use again last year on bedbugs. I hit them harder than the experts recommended, and planned for the initial treatments to fail (which they did). I took stronger precautions than recommended to prevent infesting my new place. I might still be battling them if I hadn’t followed that strategy.

Published at 18:50 on 3 January 2015

Back when I first moved to Bainbridge Island, I made a post about my experiences with cooking on an induction stove. The alternative was the electric stove my new apartment came with. The latter was not only an electric stove, but the very worst sort of electric stove, a flat-top electric stove.

Take all the lack of responsiveness of a coil stove, then add to it a fragile glass top that’s easily fractured by dropped pots, won’t work properly with anything other than an absolutely flat-bottomed pot, shows every last speck of grime in great detail, and which is virtually impossible to keep grime-free, and you have the flat-top electric stove. The appliance industry’s answer to the question: how can we make electric stoves suck even more than they already did, yet charge more for them?

But I digress. There was an escape from the fate of having to cook on that thing, and it had the form of an induction cooktop which plugged into a normal wall outlet. Naturally, I ordered one. And I was glad I did.

But, unlike the majority who give induction a try, it still left me wishing I had a gas stove again.

First, there’s the obvious matter of only flat-bottomed magnetic pots working. I like to cook with a wok, and that’s basically a non-option on induction. Sure, there’s a few expensive induction stoves that have a recessed burner capable of accepting a wok, but they’re both few and expensive and the few reviews I’ve found of them generally indicate that woks work far better with gas.

Finding replacements for my non-magnetic pans was an exercise in frustration. I would go to the store and see something I liked, but it wasn’t magnetic. I’d see something magnetic, but it wasn’t to my liking. I’d see something to my liking that was magnetic, but it was the most expensive pot in its class and something I’d use only infrequently (so the cost would be hard to justify). Finally I’d find something that seemed suitable, only to discover it’s only available as part of a larger set (which needlessly duplicates things I already have) and not individually.

Instead of knobs, the induction cooktop had touch controls. Like all touch controls, they were finicky and often did not register a touch or erroneously registered one twice. It’s far simpler and quicker to use a knob instead of having to do minor battle with a poor human:machine interface each time I adjust a stove setting.

Its surface was shiny, so it showed every last spill and fingerprint, thus demanding frequent cleaning. It wasn’t nearly as bad as a flat-top electric stove which both has this drawback and bakes the grime on, thus making it impossible to remove, but it was still annoying. It begged for cleaning much more than any gas stove I’ve used.

When I performed those frequent cleanings, the touch controls would get triggered by my wiping and the stove would be beeping like crazy and flashing error messages because there were no pots on it. Harmless, I know, and easily remedied by turning it off afterwards, but needlessly annoying. A gas stove doesn’t needlessly beep at me when I clean it.

It had a mind of its own (and a very bossy one at that). That missing-pot detection ability I just mentioned means you can’t do things like lift a pan to distribute oil or melted margarine on it. At least, you can’t without the stove first scolding you for your transgression with beeps and flashing lights and then (a few seconds later) punishing you for it by shutting the burner off. Then I would have to fight with the finicky touch controls to get it back as it was.

I didn’t want a finicky techno-toy that tries to boss me around. I wanted something simple that works with any pot made and which does what I want. That’s gas, and that’s what I had installed in my new kitchen when I bought a home last fall.

Apparently that makes me the minority. From what I’ve been able to gather by looking around the Internet, most who are used to cooking with gas who try induction like it and never go back to gas.

I find that puzzling (given my experiences), but then again, I often find it puzzling about how so many people buy and use high-tech gadgets without going through a process of evaluating how said gadget will actually improve their lives. For many, the snob appeal of being able to show others how they can afford all the latest gadgets apparently has significant value in and of itself.

That’s not the whole story here, of course. For example, most people in the USA never use a wok, so the fact that induction works poorly at best with a wok is a non-issue for them. But I rather suspect it’s a big part of the story.

Published at 10:21 on 10 December 2014

When that good price comes from a big, nationwide retailer like Sears or Home Depot, and it’s a gas appliance that you want to run on propane, that’s when.

You see, virtually no gas home appliance comes straight from the factory equipped to run on propane. A few do, but they’re very few. Most all are designed to run on natural gas, because that’s what the majority of customers use. But the difference between the two fuels is actually very minor, making it theoretically easy to convert from one to the other. And since it increases their market size, manufacturers inevitably make it easy to do said conversion. But, it’s still a conversion that has to be done. You can’t just hook the appliance up and have it operate properly.

I shopped at Sears for my stove. They had good prices, and Kenmore is actually a very highly-rated brand. Then I mentioned the p-word (propane) and the person on the phone giving me price quotes stammered and did a double-take. He said he’d have to get back to me. When he did, the cost was around $250. Goodbye to any price advantage for buying a stove from Sears as opposed to my local mom-and-pop store.

I tried Home Depot. The result was even worse. They simply didn’t do propane at all. Their “free installation” was for natural gas customers only. I’d have to pay a third-party service technician (probably from my local mom-and-pop appliance store) to convert and install it. Say goodbye to any Home Depot price advantage.

Meanwhile, the local mom-and-pop store is on an island with no natural gas service. So virtually every gas appliance they sell ends up being converted for propane use. It’s just part of their standard procedure. They tack on a fee for it, but it’s nominal by comparison.

Neither national retailer ended up being definitively more expensive, actually. It merely became a wash, price-wise. But why deal with someone out-of-town when I can deal with someone local? And why raise the spectre possible finger-pointing (“It wasn’t us! We sold you a good range! Your installer broke it!” “It wasn’t me! They sold you a defective range!”)?

It’s sort of a surprise, really. There’s lots of people in the same boat I am where I live. I’d not be surprised if a Seattle store had no idea of how to deal with a customer who used propane, but it’s a complete surprise to see such an attitude in Poulsbo.

Oh well, their loss.

Published at 10:21 on 8 December 2014

It finally (after multiple delays) got installed this morning:

(more…)

Published at 21:21 on 17 November 2014

They apparently hired a theoretical physicist to review all the cosmology in their series, yet when it came to earthly things the special effects (and story) was so bad I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief to engage in it.

Probably the most noteworthy case in point was the dust storms. Pure cheap Hollywood special effects done by people who’ve never seen a real dust storm, or even a photograph of one. The dust was this light fluffy house-dust like stuff that looked and acted absolutely nothing like the soil dust that makes up real dust storms.

The aftermath of the storms looked particularly unrealistic, like someone emptied a bunch of vacuum cleaner bags at quasi-random. The aftermath of actual severe dust storms looks much like sand dunes, as any one of a large number of photographs from the 1930s Dust Bowl attests. The ready availability of such photographs means the producers really had no excuse for such shoddy special effects.

And what’s up with dust storms blowing up when everything is green outside? The actual Dust Bowl happened in a severe multi-year drought, when there was precious little green anything, and the fields were lying fallow instead of growing lush crops of tall corn stalks. Another epic fail.

And then there’s this “blight” which breathes nitrogen and in doing so somehow consumes oxygen. Hello? Oxygen and nitrogen are two completely different elements. Any massive outbreak of a new, nitrogen-breating organism would increase the relative concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere by consuming some of the nitrogen. So the movie flunks basic chemistry as well as basic meteorology.

How the producers could do such a terrible job on mundane aspects of science while obsessing over cutting-edge issues perplexed me for a while.

Then it hit me: it’s actually consistent with the whole strange premise of the movie, that it’s somehow going to be more easy and more practical to travel through a wormhole to the far reaches of the universe, and colonize some barren desert world (even the final scenes of that one last planet showed a pretty inhospitable place that made the Dust Bowl Earth look like a green Eden by comparison) than it would be to focus on fixing problems here at home.

It’s all about ignoring (neglecting, even) the mundane and chasing madly after the esoteric and distant.

Published at 08:44 on 8 October 2014

It’s both the job market and the allergies that pushed me away, probably in about equal measures.

Of the two, the job market is the one that, fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have thought could be that big an issue. I’m really not all that focused on material things, and am quite willing to downscale my life and live modestly.

But, it’s more than just that. If the job market is bad, people will not only offer jobs for less pay. They will also offer less benefits, in particular less vacation time. In general, such a market appeals to businesses who focus on maximizing profits by spending as little on their employees as possible. So you can expect to have a less comfortable office surrounding and worse resources to work with as well as lower pay and worse benefits.

You will be working under managers who tend to be clueless and inept, as well. The good ones tend to be working in other cities where they get better compensated for their talents (and don’t have to contend with the subpar benefits or resources, either).

A job takes up such a huge chunk of one’s waking life that all this extra suckiness really ends up making one’s whole life suck more. Particularly when the stingier time off benefits make for one spending more time in that sucky office.

So sure, Seattle sucks a lot when compared to Portland. It is in general more establishment and less bohemian. Access to nature is much more strictly meted out by ability to pay for it. The mass transit is nowhere near as good.

In the end, however, those minuses don’t matter so much. There’s more time available to get away from the office and out into nature, because the jobs come with better benefits.

Because the jobs in Seattle pay more, it’s possible for me to pay for that access to nature. (It sucks that many can’t pay and have the easy access, and I will continue to advocate for fixing that, but it’s possible for me to fix that problem for myself alone in the here and now, so why shouldn’t I?)

It’s also been possible to pay for the privilege of living someplace where I can use the ferry system and a bicycle to avoid the need to choose between driving in awful traffic and coping with subpar mass transit. Again, that’s not a fix for everyone, and it sucks that this is a privilege Seattle metes out to the few who can pay, but why shouldn’t I opt to fix the transport mess for myself if I am one of those few? Again, it doesn’t stop me from advocating for more general and widespread solutions.

There’s thing that suck about both Portland and Seattle. No place is perfect. It’s just that, for me, coping strategies generally exist for dealing with Seattle metro area’s suckiness much more than they do for Portland’s.